Asda begins category transformation programme

This week marks the launch of a major piece of work that has been taking place behind the scenes at Asda during the last 12 months with the arrival of our ‘category transformation’ programme in stores.

Beginning with desserts and baking, and followed by more categories in the coming months, customers will notice revamped categories with smaller, carefully curated ranges and even better value on the products they buy the most.

Category transformation is a key component of our discount platform strategy – which aims to deliver outstanding value for customers and unrivalled access to relevant brands, products and services under one roof.

The programme has been more than 12 months in the making and is rooted in industry-leading data and analytics to make sure the changes we are making to categories are the right ones for customers.

This approach means we can focus on the areas that customers shop the most and ultimately deliver the following benefits:

• A simpler, streamlined shopping experience for customers with carefully-selected ranges featuring the products they want to buy.

• Additional space on the shelf to stock popular ranges like Extra Special and to support growth in innovative new categories such as Free From and Plant Based.

• Lower prices on many of our most popular products thanks to the improved buying terms we can secure from suppliers in return for volume growth.

• Improved availability, especially for online orders picked from store.

Reconfiguring ranges also gives us the opportunity to rethink how we use our overall space in stores and, in particular, how we can make store processes faster and easier to simplify the shopping experience for customers.

Unlocking additional space will also help us with our partnership programme, offering more opportunities for our customers to access new products and services with great partner brands like B&Q, The Entertainer, Claire’s and Accessorize.

When we offer the right ranges to our customers at the best possible prices everyone benefits and that’s why we’ve worked closely with our suppliers on this programme. We are confident that the additional volume we expect to drive on many of our key lines, alongside the drive to introduce more new ranges, will create opportunities for them to grow their business with us in the coming months.

Any initiative of this size and scale has to be consistently reviewed to ensure it remains relevant, and this is where our customers have an important role to play. Whilst the data and analytics that sits behind these changes is robust, direct feedback from customers is essential to ensure we continue to deliver the right mix of products, so we’ll continue to listen to their feedback over the coming weeks and months as we implement this important pillar of our strategy.